Laser-exact Web links from afar
Oh, how primitive is Web linking. If you want to to link to another site, you’re more or less at the mercy of the Webmaster. You either link to full pages or to anchors within them. Wouldn’t it be nice to choose precise links from afar–for both Web sites and future e-books?
Standards gurus have come up with answers to the problem such as XPointer, but there are still nasty details to work out such as how to identify the exact material to which you’re linking.
Michael Day’s approach
Over at YesLogic, XML/CSS guru Michael Day believes that the best solution for identifying remote linking targets wouldn’t be “purple numbering,” which, among other things, would “require the reader to put up with purple blobs dotted throughout the text, which look ugly and distract the eye.” Instead he says in his new blog:
A better solution would be to implement granular linking at the browser level, using the existing text selection mechanism. When the reader wishes to link to some text on a page, they should select the text they want by dragging or double clicking it, then invoke “Link To This” from the toolbar or popup menu, which would create a link to the selected text on the clipboard.The resulting link could be a coarse link to the enclosing paragraph or a granular link to the exact words, depending on the browser configuration. The link URL would require an appropriate fragment ID, which could use XPointer if the browser implementor has the stomach for it, or maybe something simpler tailored to the task at hand.
This browser extension would be more usable than purple numbers and would even work for old web pages that are unlikely to be updated in the future.
Perhaps it could be done in JavaScript. Any takers?
Comments? From an OpenReader perspective, these issues are terribly germane.
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